A healthcare order in a clinical information system represents a request by a caregiver for an action related to the patient. The action may be at the initiation of a diagnostic test, the administration of medication, or any other of a variety of other healthcare activities. Orders are captured by a clinical information system in a variety of ways including direct user entry through a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) or indirect entry by an intermediary, for example a verbal or written request received from a doctor and entered by a user of the system, or by receiving an order from an interface from another information system. Orders may be placed singly or as a group of orders. A single order may include ordering an individual medication or laboratory test for a patient, while an order set includes multiple orders for a patient. An exemplary order set is a Chem 20 laboratory test, which includes a panel of discrete tests that are ordered through a single ordering action.
Often, when performing primary clinical processes, there are limited subsets of related orders that may be appropriate under certain circumstances. In existing systems, a user is required to either place all possible orders for an order set and then cancel any orders later deemed unnecessary due to the circumstances, or to place each order individually at one or more points in time. However, these approaches are time consuming and interrupt a caregiver's workflow. It would be beneficial to have a system and method associate a set of appropriate orders in a manner that permits a user to easily select only those needed in a specific instance.